I. Field
The present invention generally relates to electronic data processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods, computer program products and systems for document authoring.
II. Background Information
Authoring tools for authoring user interface description documents are used to design user interfaces for software applications. The publication “Roam, A Seamless Application Framework”, Journal of Systems and Software 2003, by Hao-hua Chu et al. describes specific aspects that need to be considered when designing an authoring tool for software applications running on a variety of computing devices, such as desktop computers or mobile devices. These devices can have different capabilities in processors, memory, networking, screen sizes, input methods, and software libraries. Depending on users' changing situations and environments, they may choose to switch from one type of device to another that brings the best combination of application functionality and device mobility (size, weight, etc.). Based on this scenario, the computer system proposed by the publication can be used to build multi-platform applications that can run on heterogeneous devices and allow a user to move/migrate a running application among heterogeneous devices in an effortless manner. The computer system is based on partitioning of an application into components and it automatically selects the most appropriate adaptation strategy at the component level for a target platform. The publication gives information on how a UI designer should design a user interface (UI), following the different abstract layers of the UI. Among them, there is the layout and task structure, which is linked to pagination and the fine graining of the pagination algorithm. Pagination is the fact of splitting a given document into several documents, which gathered output is the same content as the original document. The aim of pagination is mainly to keep a document usable on several types of devices, which may have very different display capabilities.